Without warning

Franks was the ranking officer among them, but he deferred to Ritchie, who wasn’t burdened with managing a looming war in the Middle East, and who had the full resources of PACOM at his disposal. The admiral, like all of them, appeared tense and when he spoke it was with a clipped tone that Musso recognised. He heard the same serrated edge on his own words whenever he opened his mouth at the moment.

‘I’ll recap what we do know,’ said Ritchie, ‘before moving on to the much greater issue of what we don’t.’

Musso watched four heads, including his own, nod in a acknowledgement.

‘As of three hours, fourteen minutes ago, an event of unknown origin appears to have wiped human habitation from an area estimated at just over four million square miles…’

Tusk Musso found his throat closing involuntarily. His wife and children were deep inside that four million square miles. His whole country was, close enough. His life.

‘We have not yet mapped the exact perimeter of the effect,’ Ritchie continued. ‘But we have good estimates that it lies in a very rough ovoid shape that covers ninety per cent of the contiguous US mainland states, half of Canada, and all of Mexico above a line extending from a point a few miles south of Chilpancingo on the west coast to Chetumal on the east, and extending through the Gulf to transect Cuba seventy thousand metres north of Guantanamo. Of the larger cities on the contiguous mainland US, only Seattle appears to lie outside the area. We’re still checking on Olympia, a bit further south. Things are confused there. The Governor’s office has declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew and called out the National Guard.’

Musso couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. Nor could Susan Pileggi, he noted. He hadn’t seen any mention of Seattle in the news bulletins. As if reading his thoughts, Ritchie explained.

‘General Blackstone at Fort Lewis sent troops into the local media outlets to forestall a panic. The… uh… Governor and deputy are… unaccounted for. So too are some of the city council people for Seattle. Apparently they were at some conference in Spokane, behind the event horizon. An estimated three hundred and fifty million people were caught within the affected zone,’ Ritchie continued. ‘At this stage we have no information or even speculation about what may have happened to them, whether the effect is permanent, or stable, a natural phenomenon, or technologically based. We’ve been monitoring the reaction from any potentially hostile governments and none are behaving in any way that would give rise to a suspicion that they played any role in this.’

‘What’s happening in Beijing?’ asked General Franks.

Ritchie appeared to direct his answer to a spot just over Musso’s shoulder as he addressed the image of Franks on a screen thousands of miles away. ‘The army is pouring onto the streets in every major provincial capital, General. Martial law has been declared but none of the PLA’s force-projection assets have been mobilised. Nonetheless, our own counter-strike forces are at Def-con 2, just in case.’

Ice water pooled in Musso’s guts. Ritchie had ordered his nuclear submarines to stand ready should the need arise to reduce the communist giant to a vast crematorium. It raised an immediate question: who would authorise any such strike? Again, Ritchie seemed to be one step ahead of him.

‘I’m afraid, before we proceed any further,’ he said, ‘we need to discuss where the executive authority now lies.’

‘There’s no designated survivor?’ asked Tommy Franks.

Ritchie shook his head.

The further into this they got, the bleaker it grew, thought Musso. The ‘designated survivor’ was a Cabinet member nominated to remain apart from the other – was it sixteen or seventeen? – people in the presidential line of succession, a civilian analogue of the chain of command. The system only really operated when the executive was gathered in one place, such as during a State of the Union address, but now wasn’t the time to play semantics. If they couldn’t legitimately find somebody to step into the office of President, then any military actions they took would have no legal basis.

‘Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Labor, is in Geneva,’ said Ritchie, ‘at a UN conference. But she is specifically barred from the line of succession because she’s not a natural-born citizen. As best we can tell, there is nobody from the line… available.’

‘You mean “alive”,’ said Musso, unable to accept the euphemism any longer. ‘There is nobody else alive. In the line of succession. Back home. Anywhere within the affected area. You’ll excuse me for speaking out of turn, but I think we need to start responding to this on the basis of a worst-case scenario. It’s permanent. We cannot change it. They are not coming back and if we screw up, a lot more people are going to die.’